ISLAMIC INSPIRATION
Aga Khan donates $25M to U of A Botanic Garden
North America’s largest — and possibly the world’s coldest — Islamic-inspired garden is to be built in Alberta, a $25-million gift from the Aga Khan that’s expected to attract up to 160,000 visitors a year.
Spanning almost 12 acres, the Mughal garden, which was officially unveiled Friday, will become the centrepiece of the sprawling 240acre University of Alberta Botanic Garden, located about 15 minutes southwest of the city.
Design work on the project began six years ago after the Aga Khan, the hereditary Imam or spiritual leader of the Shia Ismaili Muslims, visited the garden and suggested the idea.
Early stages of construction began in the summer of 2016 and the new garden is scheduled to open in time for the Aga Khan’s diamond jubilee celebrations in July 2018.
The University of Alberta is predicting that the Aga Khan Garden, which will be the size of six Canadian Football League fields, could increase attendance to about 160,000 people from between 60,000-70,000 annually.
Speaking from New York earlier this week, Thomas Woltz, the principal and owner of the 45-person landscape architecture firm Nelson Byrd Woltz, the company behind the project, said the garden was “a complicated site with a lot of different inherent odd geometries twisting through a valley with different small hills.”
So, at the behest of the Aga Khan, Woltz spent a year travelling to similar Islamic gardens around the world to undertake extensive research and to study their form and design.
“That trip is what helped us avoid the sense we were making some historical quotation without a deeper understanding of space, form, scale and what the garden would be made of,” he said.
“The challenge here is how do you have a contemporary interpretation of an Islamic garden that has many of the features we discovered in our research without it reading as a reproduction or anything artificial.
“Our job was to bring a coherent narrative that would capture a 21st century vision of the history of the Mughal garden traditions, Islamic architecture and landscape architecture.”
The dominant feature of the garden will be 20 covered, 18-foot high stone columns at the top of the garden designed to provide shade in the summer and offer some protection from the elements for visitors in the winter.
Stairs will lead down to a large central courtyard, known as a chahar bagh, which is divided by walkways into four grassed areas and surrounded by native plants.
On the edge of the chahar bagh will be a terrace floating in a tank of water that links to the Calla Pond that creates a separation between the formal and informal garden.
Flanking the water on either side, orchards, or bustans, made up of local fruit trees including apples and cherries, will be dotted around ribbons of walkways.
Woltz said the movement of water around the site led designers to realize that some of the area could be dedicated to native plants and fruit trees.
“Mughal gardens are often thought of as vast pleasure gardens with ornamental shrubs and water features. But in our research, we realized that the roots of all of the formal language is actually in agriculture,” he said.
Behind the main courtyard will be a wooded walkway, known as the woodland bagh, and an openair amphitheatre.
Traditionally, in warmer climates, large date palms, olive trees and pomegranate would dominate the garden.
However the designers opted for more temperate-friendly trees like aspen, cedar and spruce.
Those plants and trees missing from the garden because of the incompatible climates will appear in relief carvings on the massive stone pillars, Woltz said.
Woltz said the garden “has lots of lessons of history and form of the Islamic garden tradition.”
“But the garden, from the beginning, was not intended to be a garden about faith or religion,” he said.
“The Mughal garden tradition is rooted in agriculture, the pavilions were really more for retreat, meditation, study and pleasure. There was no mandate from his highness to be a religious space or a religious garden.”
Stan Blade, dean of the faculty of agricultural, life and environmental sciences, said the rest of the facility will remain open during construction, meaning people can still visit sites like the Alpine Garden, Japanese Garden and the Native People’s Garden.
Friday’s official unveiling of the garden was also used to renew a memorandum of understanding between the University of Alberta and Aga Khan University for another five years.
“This garden is a place for the building of cultural understanding, of expression and a place of learning. It will be something that all Albertans can be incredibly proud of,” U of A president David Turpin said.
Aga Khan University president Firoz Rasul said the garden was a symbol of “culture, of understanding, of learning” and was a “product of our relationship.”
This project is a continuation of a decade-long relationship between the University of Alberta and the Aga Khan.
In 2006, the university signed a memorandum of understanding with the Aga Khan University and three years later, the Aga Khan was awarded an honorary doctor of law degree.